Posts

A little simple navigation
It looks like I got around to this a little quicker than anticipated. I've just finished up and published a version
of http://www.PaulChristensen.net that allows for some simple article navigation. As before, the page loads up the latest published blog post. What's new is down below I've listed out the three most recent articles after the main display. They're displayed as links, and when clicked, they'll reload the page with the selected article set as the main display, and the next three articles summarized down below. If, for some reason, you've got a desire to go back to the top, click the Home menu item at the top of the page, and you'll get redirected back to the default latest article view. Fun stuff, and it makes my site a little more interesting. I'm not sure what's going on tap next, but I'm sure I'll think of something.

Still No Beer?
No, still no beer...but next weekend I'll be sticking the current batch in to the keggerator to chill for a couple of weeks until the move is complete. Once moved to the new place I'll still let it sit for a bit until the out of town visitors drop by.
About the API
Ok, so about the API. You won't be able to see it just yet, but I've added the next little feature to my site. At some point later this week (at least that's the plan) I'll be pushing out an update to http://www.PaulChristensen.net. Currently, if you head over there you'll see the most recent post from http://ZenOfBeer.com. When the update is pushed you'll still see the most recent article, but down below I'll be displaying summaries of the next three articles as hyperlinks. Selecting one of the articles will load the full article in the main body of the page, and load summaries of the next three articles down below from that point in time. Simple navigation, but it makes…

Who designed this damn thing?
This has been driving me nuts since Netflix decided to update their icon. I don't remember when it happened,
but since that day it's been a whole big thing to try to watch Netflix on my phone or cast Netflix from my phone. It's so bad that on more than one occasion I've opened my media folder, searched, and been unable to find Netflix. After going to my app drawer to add Netflix, I go back to the folder only to find that there are now two Netflix icons. Why? They made the stupid icon white, and making the icon white makes it damn near impossible to see. Just take a look at that screenshot over there. Netflix vanishes right in to the white background.
Who does this crap? This is just as bad as those bonehead UX people who completely ignore the fact that red/green colorblind people exist.

Catching up on the important thingsSomehow or another I managed to completely ignore the fact that I'm actually in the middle of

brewing beer. Shameful, I know, especially when my original purpose for creating this blog was to talk about beer and other fermentables. While running unit tests I intend to resolve this oversight.
Zen Schwarzbier 2.0
I think I'm at version 2.0, anyway. What is it? It's a black lager. It's light, refreshing, not overly malty or hoppy, but more flavorful than a Pilsner. It's a good thing. My take on it this time around is basically the following:
#4 Pilsner Malt
#5 Dark Munich Malt
#.25 Chocolate Malt
#.25 Roasted Barley 60L
#.5 Carapils
#.25 Caramel Malt
2oz Hallertau hops
WLP830 German Lager Yeast

The more important points for this time around are that the hops go in for the full hour boil (pellets, not filtered out,) The rest of it is a little less important because I totally screwed up my other calculations.
I allowed it to sit for …

Trying to add more features
I had a few more minutes to kill so I thought I'd explore the API a little more. If you'll remember (or if you want to just click a link here that goes to http://www.PaulChristensen.net), I've implemented a Blogger V3 API call that loads the most recent article from this blog (http://www.ZenOfBeer.com) when you load the home page. It works great, and adds a little dynamic content to a site with which I never really know what to do. Anyway, I had a few more minutes to kill so I pulled out my handy dandy test app to try a couple more API calls. The idea being that once I had the call working I could implement it on my site. So, where to start?
Listing all of my blogs
I thought it might be interesting to add a little widget that let you, the reader, select from a list of all of my blogs. I have three others on this account, one of which I actually try to update from time to time. I start off plugging my data in to my test app, and no joy. I'm …

Random CrapOne of the major drawbacks of the ADT-1 is that it seems that as soon as Google launched the Nexus Player, they obsoleted the ADT-1 even though all indications are that it's a superior device. Because of this we can't expect out of the box support for full casting, we can't look forward to new updates, basically the device is frozen in time. Yes, it is possible to root and tweak some settings to enable casting, but it still kinda sucks.
Anyway, the lack of full casting support kind of limits the usefulness of the device for me (until I get around to fixing that), plus I see one of the benefits of Android TV over a Chromecast is that I don't need to always have my phone or a tablet around if I want to use it. I got bored the other day while sitting in front of the TV, and decided to look around and see if there was a decent DLNA player available for the ADT-1 through official channels. Yes, I can sideload something, but I was sitting in front of my TV and d…

Spreading The Blog Around
I'm in the process of moving. I'm sure I'll mention more of that later, but for now I've taken a break from
putting things in boxes to play around a little bit with my personal Website. The first thing was to make my site mobile friendly so that I can get a little Google index love. While I was at it I got to wondering what kind of content I should put out there, and how I can keep things interesting. Especially since I don't really do all that much with my personal site. I had a few ideas, but the one that stuck was what if I could put my blog posts over there? I'd like it to just happen magically, I don't want to go from site to site to update information. To that end, I went out and requested approval to get a quota for the Google Blogger API. I got it, and threw together a quick proof of concept. You can see it in action by going over to http://www.PaulChristensen.net. If everything is working as expected you'll see this …